Speaker 1: My name is Don Samulak. I'm President, U.S. Operations of Editage at Cactus Communications, and I'm here in the Digital Science offices of the Macmillan Building in London, UK, and talking with John Hammersley, co-founder and CEO of Overleaf. And so, welcome. It's a pleasure to be here and a pleasure to meet and talk with you. So, let me start off and just ask some very simple questions about what you do and what the value is for researchers. So, if you can just describe what the company is that you started and where the value proposition

Speaker 2: is. So, the company I started is called Overleaf, and it's a collaborative writing and publishing platform that makes it easier for researchers and authors to write, share, and then publish their research papers and their project reports online. It's really very simple. It takes an idea such as Google Docs, which is a great collaborative platform for writing notes, but it adds the types and output to that process. So, as you're writing, you can see what the types of version of a document will look like. You can share a link so that others can collaborate on your paper at the same time. And that's really great because it means that everyone's always got the latest version, and you don't have problems with V1, V1.1, 1.2, cropping up. And through the work we've now been doing with publishers, we're now making it easier to submit directly to different journals, both directly by integrating with the publisher's submission systems, and also in very simple ways by providing the author with all the files they need to download so they can then take those to the submission site. So, we're trying to really help authors and make it easier for them at the start of their writing

Speaker 1: and publishing process. So, it's very specific, my understanding, whether chemistry, math, or physics, where there's a lot of formulations and things that are not typically handled well by other word processing software. This is where your software and your existence really comes to shine.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so what we've tried to do is combine a really nice editing experience that mirrors a lot of the great features that editing packages and standard writing packages have, but behind the scenes. We use a language called LaTeX to make it easier for them, that content to be transformed into a professional typeset document. So, from an editor's point of view, they can write either using the LaTeX code, or they can edit in enriched text mode, much like MS Word. But from an output point of view, they get both the PDF and the source files, which the publishers can then use to turn that submission into a fully typeset professional document. And so, this is the big difference, really. With collaboration tools such as Google Docs, the problem then is that either the author has to spend a long time formatting and going through and trying to sort out formatting requirements from lots of different publishers, so the author has a bad experience, or the publisher takes it on themselves, and then that's a cost that the publisher has to bear in formatting manuscripts ready for publication. What we do is we provide templates for authors, so they don't need to worry about any formatting, they just write their paper. The formatting's handled automatically. And then the publishers receive much more consistent submissions, which they already know conform to certain guidelines that they require, so they can then pass that through their submission checks much more quickly. And so you have an easier process, and also a faster process, from writing to publication.

Speaker 1: So, I didn't know, myself, that the templates were there. So, templates for specific journals, so top of mind, what would be some major journals that the templates exist for?

Speaker 2: So we're working with a lot of the major publishers. So, I mean, a great example is this week, we're just launching the first template for Oxford University Press, for their new EMPH clinical briefs journal. We've done some work recently with the Genetics Society of America to provide templates for their Genetics and G3 journals. We've worked with the Optical Society of America, and we've worked with a number of others, F1000 Research and PHA, and for example, the two new Life Sciences journals. And we've also recently launched our first integrations with some of the Nature Publishing Group journals, specifically scientific data and scientific reports. And what we were doing is we're working with the editors at those journals to take their guidelines that they have in many different forms. So, some may already have a template that they provide, and some may just have a long list of formatting requirements. And we're taking that and producing a template which is easy for the authors to use when writing a paper book, provides the editorial team with what they need on submission. Because it's an online system, and because we use this structured format underneath the document, we can pass across not just the files, but also the metadata. So from an author's perspective, not only have you had a template, but you've also saved time on that submission form. So it's not just about providing a template, it's about providing a more streamlined experience

Speaker 1: all the way through. So the author really doesn't have the transparency to the behind-the-scenes publishing mechanics that we do, and what the author doesn't realize is that upon submission of a manuscript to a journal, the journal has to actually process that manuscript to extract this metadata to identify what's the title in the manuscript. These are the co-authors, their institutions, the keywords, and if that is all tagged before submission, the author's information is actually captured more accurately. So LaTeX as a platform can convince someone who is in math or physics or chemistry or other fields working LaTeX in their own structured environment, why should they, other than the submission process, the ease of submission process, what are the advantages of working in the Overleaf platform? So we provide a fully

Speaker 2: featured LaTeX editor. So you can go to Overleaf.com, hit create a new paper, and you're taken into a LaTeX editor straight away. So there's no need to download and install it or to keep your own version up-to-date. We make sure our servers run the latest version of TechLife and stable distribution of LaTeX. It also means that if you're used to using LaTeX on one computer, but you go to someone else's house or you go to a conference with just your iPad, you can still edit all your files if you have them on Overleaf. You don't have to switch entirely, so you can now sync your papers offline. So if you want to work on them whilst you're on a train or a plane or elsewhere, you can do that. And then when you next log on, you can push those changes to Overleaf, so you can combine the benefits of offline working in your preferred environment with the benefits of Overleaf when you're in different situations. And the other big advantage is if you're collaborating, and a lot of papers now are multi-author, there's an increasing number of interdisciplinary papers and multi-author papers, rather than you having to send across all your LaTeX files and potentially have an author use them with a different LaTeX distribution, or maybe they don't know LaTeX at all, and they just have to edit them in an editor with no real idea of potential errors they might introduce by making changes. They can edit it on Overleaf. We provide automatic compilation as you type, so if you do make an error or you do make a mistake, you pick it up very quickly and correct it. Using Overleaf is a great way to work collaboratively, but we've recently launched some integrations with reference managers, including Zotero, Mendeley, and Siteulike, so that if you have all your references stored in those systems, rather than having to extract them manually, you can now pull your reference library into your paper, and then as you click to cite something, it will autocomplete from your list of references. So rather than having to do all that manually, we've got this integrated reference management system. This is what I like

Speaker 1: about Overleaf, and quite honestly all the other companies in the digital science envelope, or umbrella, is that you really, as individual companies and collectively, really changing the face of science, really building the interconnectivity of collaborative tools, of tools in general. Not only is it a collaborative tool for the people who use it, but you as an organization are also collaborative with many other organizations. For example, with Editage, with us, we have a relationship, and that relationship allows authors who are using the Overleaf tool to seek editorial services on what they have created. So to you, what is the value to the author through these extraneous

Speaker 2: collaborations with Editage and others? So I mean, first of all, I think like science and research at the moment, and research communication is a hugely exciting field now, that there's a lot of new things happening. Like you said, you mentioned before that there are all these different companies now providing lots of different services within the research community around open data, around better access to research, measurements around research, and providing author support and editorial services. And I think what all the companies are doing are trying to solve different problems for authors. But from an author's perspective, what you want to do is you want to write your paper, or you want to get your research out to as many different people as possible. So I might be writing a research paper that has a lot of data involved with it, and so I might need to store that data somewhere so that I can access it, and so when I publish it, that data is available. And so that's why we're working with companies like Figshare to provide access to

Speaker 1: data for the people that need it. Similarly, you might have... And clarification, Figshare, again, is another company within the digital science umbrella of companies. Yes, and Figshare provides

Speaker 2: a way for people to share things that aren't necessarily papers. So if you have a large data set, you can upload it to Figshare, and then you can cite it from a paper, or reference it from a paper that you're writing locally, for example. But there are other people who are writing who maybe, for them, English isn't their first language, and so they don't necessarily need access to data services, but what they may need is some support on polishing and tidying up that paper ready for publication. So they won't necessarily use a Figshare integration, but what they might use is a link with a company like Editage, so that prior to publication, they can have someone else come in and use the platform and provide them with feedback. And so what Overleaf does is it provides a document in the cloud that different people can access at different times, and it can be linked to different sorts of services. So that rather than emailing files backwards and forwards, and things getting passed around, and different versions being created, by having Overleaf there and providing people, giving different people access to it at different times, whether that be other authors, whether that be editorial and support staff, or whether that be the publishing team when it's out of jam getting ready for publication, or whether that be peer reviewers, in fact, who are using it to provide reviews back to the author. That can all be done on a central document so that none of that information is lost, and you can see then the history of the paper, the full history of the paper, right from the idea and the first creation when it was set up with a title and maybe a few placeholder sections, all the way through to this polished version, which is now ready for consumption by the public, by other scientists.

Speaker 1: That's great. So thank you for this discussion, and again it's Don Samulak, President, U.S. Operations of Aditage Cactus Communications, talking with John Emersley, co-founder and CEO of Overleaf. Thank you, Don.